New Way of practicing Old Beliefs

[Leonardo17]

Here is the message of Grand Nudger in the thread called "pure Brutality" in the "Islam" part of this forum:

You believe in "original messages" because islam. The new age movement is a western movement full of western thoughts designed to satisfy a western aim. Separating suckers from their money. Neo paganism is full of western pagan thought - not alot of african gods in there. American buddhism is microtargeted at americans.

Your idea of traditional beliefs "working" is doing alot of work covering for alot of sins. One wonders, if they "worked"..why you and every other imam or guru or shaman has been continually amending and revising them, continually saying that they're all meaningfully wrong. Mantra science is not a thing. It's the belief in magic words, in cantrips and spells. In wizards, harry. You think we need to put some limits on them and they think we need to put you under the limit bus.

I do, fwiw, agree with you that all this stuff is an attempt to figure out how to live our lives. I just think that superstition and fiction are a poor basis for such practical aims...and dogmatic and fanatical new ageism is just as dogmatic, just as fanatic, and just as superstituous as any other traditional fiction. It's also very...very...western. It's the great satans most american belief set. A mashup of things from everywhere, just like it's people.

1) Well if we are talking about Neo-pagans some of them are into Norse Gods, some of them like Greco-Roman Gods others prefer the Egyptian of even Hindu Pantheon.
 
All of these new-ages approaches are very Western in nature because I don’t see them emerging in the Soviet Union or under Nazi or Fascist rule for instance. I think this has to do with the spirit of the 60’s. So yes it is very western, but it started with a feeling of dissatisfaction with the Western Cartesian and purely scientific way of doing things. I can even add to that that 20th century Western philosophical movements like existentialism etc. are great. But none of these will answer the deeper spiritual questions that many of us have.
 
2) All that I am saying on that is that I am my own shaman, İmam or preacher (mostly). I study new ideas, practice them, see if they work for me and move forward. This is very different from people doing things out of fear of hell and hope for bodily pleasures (in a phase of their existence in which they don’t even have a body to experience bodily pain or pleasures).
 
3) All beliefs can become superficial and dogmatic in time. So there are cases in which you are 100% correct. Still, the new thought movement is more dynamic and individualize din comparison to old religions. People go in, people go out. I learn, I unlearn and because it’s individualized I have no “spread the word” issue of anything like that.
 
   Also it’s easy to learn and apply on yourself. And it’s based on observation too, because in the end you can observe if this thing is useful to you or others.
 
   So again: the “Le Bled” grammar book was the main student book in schools in the 70’s. in the 80’s it was a mean of punishment and most modern schools around the world had figured out ways to make school into something that is “fun” and teachers learned to be friendly with their students instead of acting like miniature dictators.
 
   So everything in this world is evolving. So is religion and spirituality